Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression, it emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes and response vocals and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms"; as jazz spread around the world, it drew on national and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation.
In the 1930s arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music", played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines; the 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter and formal structures, in the mid-1950s, hard bop emerged, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues and blues in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay.
Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Afro-Cuban jazz. The origin of the word "jazz" has resulted in considerable research, its history is well documented, it is believed to be related to "jasm", a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning "pep, energy". The earliest written record of the word is in a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times in which a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch which he called a "jazz ball" "because it wobbles and you can't do anything with it"; the use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands". In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, "When Broadway picked it up, they called it'J-A-Z-Z', it wasn't called that. It was spelled'J-A-S-S'; that was dirty, if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies."
The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz is difficult to define because it encompasses a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to the rock-infused fusion. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music, but critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader, defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as'swing'". Jazz involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician". In the opinion of Robert Christgau, "most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz".
A broader definition that encompasses different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, group interaction, developing an'individual voice', being open to different musical possibilities". Krin Gibbard argued that "jazz is a construct" which designates "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition". In contrast to commentators who have argued for excluding types of jazz, musicians are sometimes reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music." Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres, improvisation is one of its defining elements. The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations; these work songs were structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was improvisational.
Classical music performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score, with less attention given to interpretation and accompaniment. The classical performer's goal is to play the composition. In contrast, jazz is characterized by the product of i
Bruges
Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium, in the northwest of the country. The area of the whole city amounts to more than 13,840 hectares, including 1,075 hectares off the coast, at Zeebrugge; the historic city centre is a prominent World Heritage Site of UNESCO. It is oval in about 430 hectares in size; the city's total population is 117,073. The metropolitan area, including the outer commuter zone, covers an area of 616 km2 and has a total of 255,844 inhabitants as of 1 January 2008. Along with a few other canal-based northern cities, such as Amsterdam, it is sometimes referred to as the Venice of the North. Bruges has a significant economic importance, thanks to its port, was once one of the world's chief commercial cities. Bruges is well known as the seat of the College of Europe, a university institute for European studies; the place is first mentioned in records as Bruggas, Brvccia in 840–875 as Bruciam, Brutgis uico, in portu Bruggensi, Bricge, Brycge, Bruges, Bruggas and Brugge.
The name derives from the Old Dutch for "bridge": brugga. Compare Middle Dutch brucge and modern Dutch bruggehoofd and brug; the form brugghe would be a southern Dutch variant. The Dutch word and the English "bridge" both derive from Proto-Germanic *brugjō-. Bruges was a location of coastal settlement during prehistory; this Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement is unrelated to medieval city development. In the Bruges area, the first fortifications were built after Julius Caesar's conquest of the Menapii in the first century BC, to protect the coastal area against pirates; the Franks took over the whole region from the Gallo-Romans around the 4th century and administered it as the Pagus Flandrensis. The Viking incursions of the ninth century prompted Count Baldwin I of Flanders to reinforce the Roman fortifications. Early medieval habitation starts in the 9th and 10th century on the Burgh terrain with a fortified settlement and church Bruges became important due to the tidal inlet, important to local commerce, This inlet was known as the "Golden Inlet".
Bruges received its city charter on 27 July 1128, new walls and canals were built. In 1089 Bruges became the capital of the County of Flanders. Since about 1050, gradual silting had caused the city to lose its direct access to the sea. A storm in 1134, however, re-established this access, through the creation of a natural channel at the Zwin; the new sea arm stretched all the way to Damme, a city that became the commercial outpost for Bruges. Bruges had a strategic location at the crossroads of the northern Hanseatic League trade and the southern trade routes. Bruges was included in the circuit of the Flemish and French cloth fairs at the beginning of the 13th century, but when the old system of fairs broke down the entrepreneurs of Bruges innovated, they developed, or borrowed from Italy, new forms of merchant capitalism, whereby several merchants would share the risks and profits and pool their knowledge of markets. They employed new forms of economic exchange, including letters of credit; the city eagerly welcomed foreign traders, most notably the Portuguese traders selling pepper and other spices.
With the reawakening of town life in the twelfth century, a wool market, a woollens weaving industry, the market for cloth all profited from the shelter of city walls, where surpluses could be safely accumulated under the patronage of the counts of Flanders. The city's entrepreneurs reached out to make economic colonies of England and Scotland's wool-producing districts. English contacts brought Normandy grain and Gascon wines. Hanseatic ships filled the harbor, which had to be expanded beyond Damme to Sluys to accommodate the new cog-ships. In 1277, the first merchant fleet from Genoa appeared in the port of Bruges, first of the merchant colony that made Bruges the main link to the trade of the Mediterranean; this development opened not only the trade in spices from the Levant, but advanced commercial and financial techniques and a flood of capital that soon took over the banking of Bruges. The Bourse opened in 1309 and developed into the most sophisticated money market of the Low Countries in the 14th century.
By the time Venetian galleys first appeared. Numerous foreign merchants were welcomed in Bruges, such as the Castilian wool merchants who first arrived in the 13th century. After the Castilian wool monopoly ended, the Basques, many hailing from Bilbao, thrived as merchants and established their own commercial consulate in Bruges by the mid-15th century; the foreign merchants expanded the city's trading zones. They maintained separate communities governed by their own laws until the economic collapse after 1700; such wealth gave rise to social upheavals, which were for the most part harshly contained by the militia. In 1302, after the Bruges Matins, the population joined forces with the Count of Flanders against the French, culminating in
Louis Moholo
Louis Tebogo Moholo, is a South African jazz drummer. He has been a member of several notable bands, including The Blue Notes, the Brotherhood of Breath and Assagai. Born in Cape Town, Moholo formed The Blue Notes with Chris McGregor, Johnny Dyani, Nikele Moyake, Mongezi Feza and Dudu Pukwana, emigrated to Europe with them in 1964 settling in London, where he formed part of a South African exile community that made an important contribution to British jazz, he was a member of the Brotherhood of Breath, a big band comprising several South African exiles and leading musicians of the British free jazz scene in the 1970s and is the founder of Viva la Black and The Dedication Orchestra. His first album under his own name, Spirits Rejoice on Ogun Records, is considered a classic example of the combination of British and South African players. In the early 1970s, Moholo was a member of the afro-rock band Assagai, he has played with many musicians, including Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Enrico Rava, Roswell Rudd, Irène Schweizer, Cecil Taylor, John Tchicai, Archie Shepp, Peter Brötzmann, Mike Osborne, Keith Tippett, Elton Dean and Harry Miller.
Moholo returned to South Africa in September 2005, performing with George Lewis at the UNYAZI Festival of Electronic Music in Johannesburg. He now goes under the name Louis Moholo-Moholo. South African promoter Slow Life in March 2017 at the Olympia Bakery in Kalk Bay, Cape Town produced a show where Louis performed along with Mark Fransman, Reza Khota, Keenan Ahrends and Brydon Bolton. Louis Moholo with Keith Tippett/Mervyn Africa/Pule Pheto, Mpumi: Duos. Ogun 014 Louis Moholo's Bra-Louis-Bra Tebs/Spirits Rejoice. Ogun 017/018 Louis Moholo's Viva-la-Black, Freedom tour: Live In South Afrika 1993. Ogun 006 Louis Moholo's Exile. Ogun 003 Louis Moholo-Moholo Unit, An Open Letter to My Wife Mpumi. Ogun 031 Louis Moholo-Moholo with Sibanye. Intakt 145 Chris McGregor Septet, Up to Earth, 1969, Fledg'ling 3069 Philippe Carles, André Clergeat, Jean-Louis Comolli, Dictionnaire du Jazz, Paris, 1994; when free jazz means freedom by Gary May published in French in 2005 in the magazine ImproJazz. This site includes a 2010 interview with Moholo-Moholo by Olivier Ledure originally published in ImproJazz.
FMP releases
New England Conservatory of Music
The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, is the oldest independent school of music in the United States, it is recognized as one of the country's most distinguished music schools. NEC is known for its strings, piano and brass departments, its prestigious chamber music program; the conservatory, located on Huntington Avenue of the Arts near Boston Symphony Hall, is home each year to 750 students pursuing undergraduate and graduate studies along with 1400 more in its Preparatory School as well as the School of Continuing Education. At the collegiate level, NEC offers the Bachelor of Music, Master of Music, Doctor of Musical Arts, as well as the Undergraduate Diploma, Graduate Diploma, Artist Diploma. Offered are five-year joint double-degree programs with Harvard University and Tufts University. NEC is the only music school in the United States designated as a National Historic Landmark and it is a pending Boston Landmark, its primary concert hall, Jordan Hall, hosts 1,000 concerts each year.
In June 1853, Eben Tourjée, at the time a nineteen-year-old music teacher from Providence, Rhode Island, made his first attempt to found a music conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. He met with a group of Boston's most influential musical leaders to discuss a school based on the conservatories of Europe; the group included John Sullivan Dwight, an influential music critic, Dr. J. Baxter Upham, president of the Harvard Musical Association, Oliver Ditson, a prominent music publisher; the group rejected Tourjée's plans, arguing that it was a poor idea to open a conservatory amidst the nation's political and economic uncertainty that would lead up to the American Civil War. Tourjée made his next attempt in December 1866, when he again met with a group of Boston's top musicians and music patrons. Among Upham and Dwight at this meeting were Carl Zerrahn, a popular Boston conductor, Charles Perkins, a prominent arts patron. In the thirteen-year interim, Tourjée had founded three music schools in Rhode Island, this time was able to win over his audience.
The men agreed to help Tourjée, The New England Conservatory opened on February 18, 1867. It consisted of seven rooms rented above Music Hall off Tremont Street in downtown Boston. In 1870 it moved to the former St. James Hotel in Franklin Square in the South End; the NEC campus consists of three buildings on both sides of Gainsborough Street, between St. Botolph Street and Huntington Avenue, one block from Symphony Hall; the Jordan Hall Building, whose main entrance is at 30 Gainsborough Street, is NEC's main building, home to Jordan Hall, Williams Hall, Brown Hall, the Keller Room, the Isabelle Firestone Audio Library, the Performance Library, professor studios/offices, practice rooms. The second building, at 33 Gainsborough, is the Residence Hall, a coed dormitory which houses the Harriet M. Spaulding Library and the "Bistro 33" dining center; the St. Botolph Building, at 241 St. Botolph street, contains Pierce Hall, a computer laboratory, the electronic music studio, the majority of the school's classrooms and administrative offices.
Jordan Hall is NEC's central performing space. Opened in 1904, Jordan Hall was the gift of New England Conservatory trustee Eben D. Jordan the 2nd, a member of the family that founded the Jordan Marsh retail stores and himself an amateur musician. In 1901, Jordan donated land for NEC's main building, while offering to fund a concert hall with a gift of $120,000; the dedication concert of Jordan Hall, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, took place on October 20, 1903. Newspaper accounts deemed the hall "unequaled the world over," and The Boston Globe reported that it was "a place of entertainment that European musicians who were present that evening say excels in beauty anything of the kind they saw."A major renovation project was completed in 1995. The renovated hall won the 1996 Massachusetts Historical Commission Preservation Award, the Victorian Society in America's Preservation Commendation, the 1996 Boston Preservation Alliance Award, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America Award of Merit, the Illuminating Engineering Society 1996 Lumen Award.
Admission to NEC is based on a competitive live audition. The conservatory offers degrees in orchestral instruments, piano, jazz studies, contemporary improvisation and voice, music history, music theory; the conservatory has served as a training ground for orchestral players to fill the ranks of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, much as the Curtis Institute serves as a training ground for the Philadelphia Orchestra, although composers and singers are offered courses of study as well. New England Conservatory's Preparatory School is an open-enrollment institution for pre-college students; the preparatory school offers music classes and private instruction for young musicians, fosters over 35 small and large ensembles. Students enrolled in the Preparatory School may participate in the Certificate Program, allowing students to achieve their optimum performance skills, competence in music theory, a knowledge of the literature that includes choral and chamber music, as well as solo repertoire. NEC Prep is home to one of the world's leading youth orchestras, the selective Youth Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the NEC Youth Chorale who have performed for prominent world figures including the Pope at the Vatican in the past years.
The Youth Philharmonic Orchestra headed by David Loebel is arguably the most selective group at the school. The Preparatory School houses the Massachusetts Youth Wind Ensemble, a selective touring wind ensemble open to advanced high school wo
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best known works are Typee, a romantic account of his experiences of Polynesian life, his whaling novel Moby-Dick. Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a merchant who dealt in French dry goods and his wife. Years as a common sailor from 1839 to 1844 were the basis of his early writings, his first book was Typee, a romanticized account of his life among Polynesians. It became such a best-seller; these successes gave him the financial basis to marry Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of a prominent Boston family, but the success proved hard to sustain. His first novel, not based on his own experiences was Mardi, a sea narrative that develops into a philosophical allegory—but it was not well received, he received warmer reviews for Redburn, a story of life on a merchant ship, his 1850 description of the harsh life aboard a man-of-war in White-Jacket, but they did not provide financial security.
Moby-Dick, although now considered one of the great American novels, was not well received, critics scorned his psychological novel, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, most notably "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "The Encantadas", "Benito Cereno"; these and three other stories were collected in 1856 as The Piazza Tales. In 1857, he traveled to England and toured the Near East; the Confidence-Man was the last prose work. He turned to poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his oldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876, a metaphysical epic. In 1886, his son Stanwix died, Melville retired. During his last years, he published two volumes of poetry, left one volume unpublished, returned to prose of the sea; the novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death but was published in 1924.
Melville's death from cardiovascular disease in 1891 subdued a reviving interest in his work. The 1919 centennial of his birth became the starting point of the "Melville Revival". Critics discovered his work, scholars explored his life. Born Herman Melvill in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan Melvill and Maria Melvill into a family of Dutch extraction. Herman was the third of eight children, his siblings, who played important roles in his career as well as in his emotional life, were Gansevoort. Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Melville's father spent much time out of New York and in Europe as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. Both of Melville's grandfathers were heroes of the Revolutionary War. Major Thomas Melvill had taken part in the Boston Tea Party, his maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, was famous for having commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in New York in 1777. Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."
Major Melvill sent his son Allan not to college but to France at the turn of the nineteenth century, where he spent two years in Paris and learned to speak and write French fluently. He subscribed to his father's Unitarianism. In 1814, Allan married Maria Gansevoort, committed to the Dutch Reformed version of the Calvinist creed of her family; the severe Protestantism of the Gansevoort's tradition ensured that she knew her Bible well, in English as well as in Dutch, the language she had grown up speaking with her parents. Three weeks after his birth, on August 19, Herman Melville was baptized at home by a minister of the South Reformed Dutch Church. During the 1820s, Melville lived a privileged, opulent life, in a household with three or more servants at a time. At four-year intervals, the family would move to more spacious and elegant quarters settling on Broadway in 1828. Allan Melvill lived beyond his means and on large sums he borrowed from both his father and his wife's widowed mother, his wife's opinion of his financial conduct is unknown.
Biographer Hershel Parker suggests Maria "thought her mother's money was infinite and that she was entitled to much of her portion now, while she had small children." How well, biographer Delbanco adds, the parents managed to hide the truth from their children is "impossible to know."In 1830, Maria's family lost patience and their support came to a halt, at which point Allan's total debt to both families exceeded $20,000. The felicity of Melville's early childhood, biographer Newton Arvin writes, depended not so much on wealth as on the "exceptionally tender and affectionate spirit in all the family relationships in the immediate circle." Arvin describes Allan as "a man of real sensibility and a warm and loving father," while Maria was "warmly maternal, simple and affectionately devoted to her husband and her brood."Melville's education began when he was five, around the time the Melvills moved to a newly built house at 33 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. In 1826, the same year that Melville contracted scarlet fever, Allan
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City is the largest city in the U. S. state of Missouri. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the city had an estimated population of 488,943 in 2017, making it the 37th most-populous city in the United States, it is the central city of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which straddles the Kansas–Missouri state line. Kansas City was founded in the 1830s as a Missouri River port at its confluence with the Kansas River coming in from the west. On June 1, 1850 the town of Kansas was incorporated. Confusion between the two ensued and the name Kansas City was assigned to distinguish them soon after. Sitting on Missouri's western boundary, with Downtown near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the modern city encompasses some 319.03 square miles, making it the 23rd largest city by total area in the United States. Most of the city lies within Jackson County, but portions spill into Clay and Platte counties. Along with Independence, one of its major suburbs, it serves as one of the two county seats of Jackson County.
Other major suburbs include the Missouri cities of Blue Springs and Lee's Summit and the Kansas cities of Overland Park and Kansas City. The city is composed of several neighborhoods, including the River Market District in the north, the 18th and Vine District in the east, the Country Club Plaza in the south. Kansas City is known for its long tradition of jazz music and culture, for its cuisine, its craft breweries. Kansas City, Missouri was incorporated as a town on June 1, 1850, as a city on March 28, 1853; the territory straddling the border between Missouri and Kansas at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers was considered a good place to build settlements. The Antioch Christian Church, Dr. James Compton House, Woodneath are listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the first documented European visitor to Kansas City was Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, the first European to explore the lower Missouri River. Criticized for his response to the Native American attack on Fort Détroit, he had deserted his post as fort commander and was avoiding French authorities.
Bourgmont lived with a Native American wife in a village about 90 miles east near Brunswick, where he illegally traded furs. To clear his name, he wrote Exact Description of Louisiana, of Its Harbors and Rivers, Names of the Indian Tribes That Occupy It, the Commerce and Advantages to Be Derived Therefrom for the Establishment of a Colony in 1713 followed in 1714 by The Route to Be Taken to Ascend the Missouri River. In the documents, he describes the junction of the "Grande Riv des Cansez" and Missouri River, making him the first to adopt those names. French cartographer Guillaume Delisle used the descriptions to make the area's first reasonably accurate map; the Spanish took over the region in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, but were not to play a major role other than taxing and licensing Missouri River ship traffic. The French continued their fur trade under Spanish license; the Chouteau family operated under Spanish license at St. Louis in the lower Missouri Valley as early as 1765 and in 1821 the Chouteaus reached Kansas City, where François Chouteau established Chouteau's Landing.
After the 1804 Louisiana Purchase and Clark visited the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, noting it was a good place to build a fort. In 1831, a group of Mormons from New York settled in, they built the first school within Kansas City's current boundaries, but were forced out by mob violence in 1833 and their settlement remained vacant. In 1833 John McCoy, son of missionary Isaac McCoy, established West Port along the Santa Fe Trail, 3 miles away from the river. In 1834 McCoy established Westport Landing on a bend in the Missouri to serve as a landing point for West Port. Soon after, the Kansas Town Company, a group of investors, began to settle the area, taking their name from an English spelling of "Cansez." In 1850, the landing area was incorporated as the Town of Kansas. By that time, the Town of Kansas and nearby Independence, had become critical points in the United States' westward expansion. Three major trails – the Santa Fe, Oregon – all passed through Jackson County. On February 22, 1853, the City of Kansas was created with a newly elected mayor.
It had an area of 0.70 square miles and a population of 2,500. The boundary lines at that time extended from the middle of the Missouri River south to what is now Ninth Street, from Bluff Street on the west to a point between Holmes Road and Charlotte Street on the east; the Kansas City area was rife with animosity just prior to the U. S. Civil War. Kansas petitioned the U. S. to enter the Union as a free state that did not allow slavery under the new doctrine of popular sovereignty. Missouri had many slaves, slavery sympathizers crossed into Kansas to sway the state towards allowing slavery, at first by ballot box and by bloodshed. During the Civil War, the city and its immediate surroundings were the focus of intense military activity. Although the First Battle of Independence in August 1862 resulted in a Confederate States Army victory, the Confederates were unable to leverage their win in any significant fashion, as Kansas City was occupied by Union troops and proved too fortified to assault.
The Second Battle of Independence, which occurred on October 21–22, 1864 as part of Sterling Price's Missouri expedition of 1864 resulted in a Confederate triumph. Once again their victory proved hollow, as Price was decisively defeated in the pivotal Battle of Westport the next day ending Confederate e
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
